It hadn't even been a week since the Duma passed a law introducing internet censorship under the pretext of fighting pedophiles, and already this new law is being used against one of the most successful projects of the Russian internet — VKontakte. They are trying to use it in the best traditions of the Soviet era and according to the textbooks of the Higher School of the KGB — to stage a provocation and respond with repression.

Unlike the VK administration, I wasn't surprised at all by this. To be honest, this is exactly what I expected.

It's time to get used to it: we live in a kingdom of distorted mirrors. And nothing here is what it seems. This happens when rulers fear their people and do not trust them. This happens when they cannot tell the people the truth about how power is structured, how the state is organized, and when they have to invent and stage another state — sweet and ideal, having nothing in common with reality.

When the authorities pass a law to combat pedophilia on the internet, this law, of course, must be read upside down and through a mirror.

From acquaintances close to the corridors of power, I have repeatedly heard stories that at the heights of power, when neither money, nor estates, nor women bring pleasure anymore, minors remain. The most terrible, the most disgusting, and the most depraved. Something they would be afraid to allow themselves without access to certain resources and certain protections. But, belonging to the ruling caste, bound by mutual complicity, they allow themselves this more often than we dare to think.

By accusing others of their own most shameful sins, they, on one hand, frighten those who are contemplating desertion — they strengthen party discipline. Entry costs a kopeck, exit a ruble. Remember, we know everything about you...

On the other hand, by raising the banner of the sacred fight against pedophilia, they hope to use its sanctity and inviolability to overcome public resistance on the most sensitive issues.

It is clear to me, and to any thinking person, that the problem with VKontakte is not that some child pornography is distributed there. The problem with VKontakte is that Durov refused to follow the FSB's directive to close opposition groups during rallies, and that he refused to appear for a preventive conversation at the Big House. That he imagined he was already in Silicon Valley. And so he was reminded that from St. Petersburg, Kolyma is much closer than San Francisco.

Now is the time for the election winners to gather stones and tie them around the necks of those who dared to challenge them.

And the distribution of child pornography on VKontakte right after the adoption of the internet censorship law is a black mark from the authorities, a stone around the neck of the most dynamic project of the Russian internet. Next on the agenda — the prosecutor's performance, a staged and showy trial, a hostile takeover, and the removal of the current managers. If they don't understand the hints already.

Learn to read through the mirror, folks. You'll be living in this kingdom for a long time yet.

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